Perl ROCKS at text processing. It beat all other languages, including gcc, when it came to regular expression matching, and was near the top in spell checking, word concatenation, etc.

On everything else Perl was, well, in the toilet. Indeed, the only language it consistently beat was tcl. When it came to method invocation, perl was the worst language tested in terms of CPU time.

One point to consider is that these tests probably included the time for perl to first compile the test script and then run it. In some environments (mod_perl?) I believe that Perl will cache a compiled version of whatever it is doing, so performance would improve.

Even so, what I am seeing is that for tasks in which the primary processing load is something other than text processing Perl may not be the most efficient execution language.

That does not mean we should not use it. After all, assembler is the most efficient language that there is, but few recommend developing in it. However, I now believe that a competent programmer should excel in more than just perl. Like Larry. He knows Perl backwards and forwards, but he also knows C, and that is what he chose to write Perl in.